7 ideas for using Delve boards

Last week Microsoft started releasing boards in Office Delve – a new feature that helps you organize content you discover with Office Delve. If you’re wondering what you might use Delve boards for, here are a few ideas.

Project board

When working on a project you could create a board in Delve to group all content relevant to that project. This would help the project team to quickly access all project-related documents as well as it would allow the rest of the organization to see what’s happening in that project.

Topic board

Another thing that quickly comes to mind, when thinking about using boards, is to create a board for a particular topic. By tagging documents with that topic you and your colleagues would make it easier for everyone in your organization to find content relevant to that topic.

Team board

You could use Delve boards to support the collaboration in your team. One scenario would be to have a board for your team to share their work with the rest of the organization. This would allow the organization to stay on top of the work that the team is doing.

Another idea could be to have a board for the team members to share content with each other. By adding a document to the board team members could share interesting content they discovered with the rest of the team.

Status board

When working on a couple of documents you could use boards to help you quickly get back to those documents. Delve already contains the ‘My work’ board that shows the documents you have recently modified, but a board around a specific status (like Drafts, Approved, etc.) could help you collaborate with your colleagues and documents that they are working with and find the right document more easily.

Examples

When creating documents, whether it’s a technical specification or a presentation, I often start with looking at other similar documents my colleagues created. This helps me create a document that is consistent with the rest of the organization with regard to contents, presentation and tone of voice. Having a board containing references to documents that we all find are good examples would help me get my work done. And because boards are public, everyone could contribute their suggestions and we could all choose other documents to become examples over time.

Save for later

Using Delve is a great way to discover new content relevant to you. If you’re busy however, you might not be able to read those documents directly. Because content you see in Delve changes as new documents are created and you and your colleagues interact with them, there is a chance you might loose that one document. By creating a Save for later board for yourself, you could keep track of that document and get back to it once you have time.

Suggested content

Having discovered an interesting document in Delve you might want to share it with your colleagues. By tagging it with their Suggested content board you could easily bring that document to their attention. One downside of this idea is that currently Delve does not notify you when new documents are added to a board and you would need to check it regularly yourself to see the latest suggestions.

Summary

Boards in Office Delve offer new abilities to organize content. Many of the ideas presented above can be achieved without Delve boards. The chances are that you are already using some other ways to group content related to projects, topics or teams. The real added value of using Delve boards above other solutions will be once Delve starts surfacing content from outside of Sites allowing you to easily access content no matter where it’s stored.

The ideas presented above might not be suitable for everyone, but that’s just what they are: ideas, meant to help you think about how you could leverage boards in your organization. So, what are your board ideas?